


I will keep the bank from calling

by isawet



Category: Isotopia
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Collegeverse, F/M, Gen, Isoverse, Other, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 13:38:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isawet/pseuds/isawet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gallium meets Aluminium at his first college party.</p><p> </p><p>Warnings: slight homophobia</p>
            </blockquote>





	I will keep the bank from calling

**Author's Note:**

> for els. :*

1

Gallium meets Aluminium at the Rainbow Center Unofficial Party to kick off the coming new year. Gallium assumes it’s officially unofficial because of the red plastic cup that’s pressed into his palm when he walks in the door, something he’s assured is punch but smells like selzer water and six dollar vodka. He pours it down the sink in the kitchen and shuffles in the cooler for a beer, and that’s when he collides with Aluminium. At first all he sees is dyed silvery grey hair that matches the shimmer of the shirt she’s wearing, something that crinkles metallically under the steadying hand he has on her hip. It catches the light oddly, and sends glare to obscure her facial features.

“Oh,” he says, fumbling, “oh, sorry, I--” He snatches his hand up, and it upsets his balance, the beer in his hand frothing over and dripping on his shoes.

“You can’t even drink alcohol made from organically grown grain,” she says in that loud accusing voice drunk people get when they don’t believe they’re properly drunk.

“Um.” Gallium says apologetically, and leans back as she brandishes a pamphlet in his face, ink bleeding together the way it does when it’s printed on cheap recycled paper.

“ _Freedom for wheat and germ_ ,” she shouts, and falls asleep against the refrigerator. Her shirt shifts, and Gallium thinks that she’s lovely, just lovely, even with that funny coloured hair. He shakes himself a little, and leaves when another girl stumbles in, half singing _ally ally mini uuhmm_.

(he meets her again in line for coffee at the library cafe. he convinces her the house roast doesn’t support the systematic rape of the Amazonian rainforest and she tells him her hair is dyed to symbolically bring awareness to the stripping of the earth’s richness, the way she stripped her hair of pigment.)

2

Gallium likes running the support group. He likes lugging the cardboard cartons of Dunkin Donut’s coffee to the small table near the door and the way his calm, welcoming manner makes the tension bleed out of shoulders and spines. It always runs late, with people asking vague questions and avoiding eye contact, and by the time he’s sweeping wooden coffee stirrers into the metal trashcan it’s late and the student union is dark on that floor, although he can hear chatter and see the faint glow of lights coming from the downstairs food court.

“Hi!” someone says brightly from the doorway, and Gallium looks up. He feels the blood rise in his face. 

“Hi,” he says shyly, and Aluminium offers him a full cup, steaming lightly. 

“I didn’t know you ran a group here,” she says. “I run UADFCFGM.” Gallium stares at her.  
“Yooaddfuguhm,” he tries.

“ United Against the Dark Forces of Corporate Greed For the Good of Mother Nature,” she explains.

“I haven’t heard of that one,” Gallium says politely. 

“Oh no one’s in it but me,” Aluminium says cheerfully, “but it’s the _intent_. Soon the cause will spread itself.”

Gallium takes a sip of the cup she’d given him and tries not to choke, his eyes watering. “I see,” he rasps.

“It’s indigenous dirt tea made from the roots of the Amazonian Rainforest,” Aluminium says passionately, and Gallium has the sudden visual image of the brightly coloured poisonous floral he sees in the advertisements for the discovery channel. He sets the cup down quickly.

“Silicon says I shouldn’t bother because the cost of buying the tea doesn’t trickle down to the people making it, but shouldn’t supporting the industry help even a little _Silicon is stupid_.” She breathes heavily, and Gallium actually agrees with her on this point, but he’s also caught Silicon breaking into the Biolab with a printout picture of what the rare white praying mantis looks like and a small plastic terrarium, muttering about Sodium and Potassium, so he’s less likely to take what Silicon says seriously.

“Do you want--” he says abruptly, and turns on his heel to glance out the window, one hand snaking under his collar to brush across the scars on his chest, faded but visible.

“Are you hungry,” Aluminium interrupts, “there’s a vegan cafe just outside campus that stays open until ten-twenty seven, because that’s the exact number of Native American tribes left in--” Gallium tunes her out a little, and enjoys the way her eyes light up. He also smirks, because her own cup of dirt tea is clearly just as full as his.

(He doesn’t even mind that she shouts at the girl behind the register for fifteen minutes because the soy chicken resembles real chicken far too much and that when he stops for gas on the way back she make his drive to the station fifteen miles away because it’s owned by a minority family)

3

Gallium has learned that Aluminium is one of the thickest girls he’s ever met in his life, but when he comes back from the counter with organic tomatoes on pita bread for her and that ridiculously expensive free-range chicken pilaf he only gets when he has lunch with her, he sees the way her eyes linger on a brown haired girl in ripped up jeans and a plaid top, the way she pauses for a second in her lecture on how Kraft cheese products are destroying the fabric of humanity. Gallium feels something clench so hard in his chest his breath catches. 

“--are you okay,” Aluminium is asking, and Gallium takes every dream he’s had of her silver braid across his fingers and breathing _allie_ into the column of her neck, waking up to the stink of her herbal tea and his parent’s frozen smiles when she lampoons them for owning artwork made from pigmentation stolen from living plants, and shoves them in the back of his mind, underneath the ones where his cousins don’t hiss _fag_ at him and where the state lets him change the letter on his birth certificate from _f_ to m.

“Don’t you think you’re taking the issue of Disney Princess minorities in relation to child labour laws a little too seriously?” he asks blandly, and enjoys the way her face turns an alarming shade of puce.

4

Gallium meets a girl called Tungsten, which he feels is a tragically unfortunate name but oddly fitting for a Drama major. He’s paired up with her for a public speaking exercise, and has to use every ounce of creativity he has to politely veto every quote she wants to use for starting their speech.

“I like your sweater,” he finally says, for lack of anything else to say. “That song is cool too.”

“Alanis Morissette is amazing,” she agrees, “I really love irony, so that’s why I think her music really speaks to me.”

“... Nothing in that song is ironic,” Gallium says, not without resignation, but she looks so adorably confused that he smiles despite himself.

“Well, as T.S Eliot said, _nothing lost, nothing gained_.” She twirls her pen in her fingers and shoves her glasses, the ones with thick black frames but no lenses, higher up on her nose.

“T.S. Eliot didn’t say that,” Gallium says with a fair amount of certainty. 

“I’m more of a Yeats girl,” Tungsten confesses, and Gallium feels flimsy metal edges of a grey shirt under his fingers, beer dripping over his fingers.

(Aluminium calls her that-girl-with-the-stupid-sweaters, but Gallium gets revenge by saying Tungsten’s grandmother passed messages for the French Revolution and smugly watches Aluminium pretend to appreciate Tungsten’s heritage until she finds out the truth three weeks later.)

5

Gallium stays over for Thanksgiving break, because he promised Aluminium he’d stay for the powerpoint presentation she’d put together on which foods were historically and culturally appropriate for a “True Thanksgiving” and he’s looking forward to Tungsten quoting Yeats instead of saying the religiously-encompassing-but-also-neutral-grace Aluminium has spent the last month writing.

Aluminium hugs him in her tiny apartment kitchen, holding an organic pumpkin pie that cost her half her biweekly paycheck from the library job. “I’m glad I met you, Gally,” she says, and laughs at the way his face twists at the moniker. Aluminium is the only one that has ever treated him like he never used to be a girl, and he lets himself tilt his nose into her hair and inhale once, the scent of tropical flowers, the shampoo she insists she doesn’t use because it would go against her morals.

He can hear Tungsten misquoting Pocahantus in the next room to Silicon, who is pretending he’s not the one that made the ladybug cookies for Potassium while simultaneously waging a silent war with Aluminium and dropping crumbs down Sodium’s coat when no one is looking, and he thinks that college really is full of weirdos.


End file.
